For this month’s Art of Association Podcast, I spoke with Yordanos Eyoel, the Founder and CEO of Keseb, a path-breaking nonprofit helping to build a transnational civil society ecosystem that advances inclusive and resilient democracies.
You can listen to our wide-ranging conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Pocket Casts.
We begin with Yordanos sharing how her experience growing up in Ethiopia amid civil war and ethnic strife, and then finding refuge in the United States with her family, shaped her commitment to renewing democracy in this country and around the world.
Yordanos and I go on to talk about her experience as a venture philanthropist and democracy entrepreneur, the power of taking a transnational approach to democracy field-building, and the tension between defending civil society while at the same time seeking to reimagine it. We also dig into the strategy and theory of change guiding Keseb’s work and what she and her colleagues have learned from it thus far.
Finally, we consider a paradox that has always struck me: Why do illiberal populists, wedded to notions of blood-and-soil nationalism, seem to find it easier to join forces and amplify one another's efforts around the world than democracy advocates whose work is animated by universal values of equality and human dignity?
Yordanos and her colleagues at Keseb are working to address this imbalance by helping pro-democracy leaders collaborate and learn from one another across national borders.
Please listen and share the episode with others in your network who might be interested. And if you could give the podcast a quick rating or review, it would help more people discover it — and I would be much obliged.
You note: “Finally, we consider a paradox that has always struck me: Why do illiberal populists, wedded to notions of blood-and-soil nationalism, seem to find it easier to join forces and amplify one another's efforts around the world than democracy advocates whose work is animated by universal values of equality and human dignity?”
Short answer: Blood-and-soil nationalists are attracted to traditional inward-reaching tribal forms of organization. Democracy advocates may aspire to building tribal movements, but they’re bound to rely on modern outward-reaching network forms of organization — much harder to do in tribalized societies.
Longer answer: It’s a pretty straightforward expression of evolutionary dynamics per the TIMN (Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Networks) framework that you may recall. Accordingly, societies have evolved across many the ages, beginning with the Tribes form, then next adding the hierarchical Institutions form, and later adding the Markets form — resulting in our modern societies with three major realms (civil society, government, market economy). Currently on the rise is the information-age Networks form. It’s currently disrupting everything and everyone operating in the first three forms/realms, though it promises an eventual transformation that will add a fourth realm decades from now.
What’s to notice? The possibility of blood-and-soil populism never goes away. When people lose hope, faith, and trust in their government) and economy, they revert to tribal ways of thinking, organizing, and behaving, especially if political democracy never resonated much with them anyway. Much the case today.
Me, I’m all for liberal democracy. But I’ve learned that it too is an outcome of TIMN dynamics in ways rarely noticed. Liberal democracy is the result of +M forces penetrating and influencing +I forces — the result of pro-market ideas spreading into pro-hierarchy circles centuries ago. And I mean +M not simply in economic terms, but also in philosophical, political, social, and cultural senses. Of TIMN’s four major forms of organization and evolution, only +M is inherently about freedom and liberty, variety and diversity — it allows societies to seek capacities for decontrol as well as control.
Why suggest this? Because democracy-advocacy discussions I happen to see never notice that, to endure, a healthy democracy needs healthy free fair open market ideas and systems too, and not just for business and economics. Many discussions do bring up capitalism and its roles, but capitalism and the market system are different ideals (many capitalists want rigged markets).
From a TIMN perspective, democracy advocacy will work better if it emphasizes market values and systems, and referred to capitalism only if/when someone else brings it up.
Onward.